Category: 35mm Film

Named #1 film of all time by just about every list of repute, Citizen Kane’s impact is almost impossible to overstate. And much like its protagonist, the film’s history is ripe with stories of intrigue and sabotage. Ostensibly the life story of millionaire newspaper man Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles), Citizen Kane is a series of… Continue reading The Missing Pieces of Citizen Kane

In 2016 it seems almost antiquated to refer to a piece of fiction as dangerous. Words like “shocking” or “disturbing” have become so overused that they’re now only good for adorning horror movie posters. But there are still films like Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom that retain an aura of real power, a fear that… Continue reading The Contaigous Evil of Salo

Watching a bad movie can be an incredibly depressing experience. You’re watching paper-thin characters spout inane dialogue while perusing some ill-defined McGuffin when a horrible realisation dawns on you: you have paid for this feeling. If not with money, then at the very least with your time. At the end of a ninety-minute bad movie… Continue reading What Makes a Good Bad Movie?

Every now and again, a film will come along that changes the way I look at cinema. When I was still in my teens, I attended a cinema on Bourke Street late one evening to see a motion picture I had long been curious about: Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), adapted from the 1962… Continue reading A Clockwork Orange

Given the world’s ever-increasing obsession with technology – the way gadgets control us more than we control them; as these technologies, supposedly designed to make our lives easier, only lead to further reliance on technologies – Modern Times (1936) is now more timely than ever before. The promised future of a world where machines do… Continue reading Chaplin Greats

There is a tendency for less enlightened film viewers to classify old motion pictures as “dated” due to superficialities such as quaint anachronisms present in the dialogue (“Groovy, daddy-o!”), wardrobe choices that haven’t been fashionable for decades (turtlenecks and bell bottoms, to name just two), archaic production design (loud wallpaper, mirror balls), right down to… Continue reading 1973: A Great Year For the Future